If you hear [Richard Pryor's album Is It Something I Said?] and find it offensive, outrageous, gross, unbelievable, and otherwise distasteful, you are perfectly normal. You probably will have to fight with your own tastes and the social con...

[The 158-Pound Marriage] is impressively flashy in episode and style, deceptively arch, and pocked all over with little depth charges of drama that rumble up with an aching, rueful but often hilarious humor. Irving fingers a human foible li...

[1941] is an overblown repetitive, cartoon-style satire that runs into the ground a good hour before it ends. Yet there are things to be prized in it…. Set in Los Angeles the week after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, 1941 jumps back an...

In the first half of the 19th century the processes known as Industrialization and Urbanization started to transform Europe. It affected and changed every aspect of life of every citizen of every European nation. The notorious results of ...

Robert Altman's 3 Women is such a stimulating achievement in cinematic art that it makes one rethink the whole aesthetic of motion pictures…. There is something so utterly unusual about 3 Women that its like may never materialize again, e...

SOURCE: "From 400 Blows to Small Change." in The New Republic, Vol. 176, No. 14, April 2, 1977, pp. 23-5. In the following review, Mast compares Small Change to Truffaut's earlier film The 400 Blows. Mast states that although both films hav...

8 1/2 8 1/2 (1963) by Federico Fellini about a man named Guido, an Italian director who has lost inspiration for his upcoming movie. He is continuingly feeling pressure from his friends, wife, mistress and producer. His only way to escap...

A.A. Milne (1882-1956) worked as an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and an adult novelist, in addition to his important contribution as an author of juvenile books. Although he attempted to excel in all literary genres, he was master of Ch...

[Yehoshua] brings to his plays a knack for structural compactness, for manipulation of character and for creating a sense of an impending turning point. All these dramatic commodities are dynamically galvanized by a dialogue that rapidly al...

The legacy of leading Australian poet A. D. Hope to world literature is unquestionable, comprising eleven books of poetry, seven collections of critical essays, and two plays. His writing, compelling in its originality and passion, and rig...

A. G. Mojtabai opens Mundome with an image of dissolution and decay. The landscape she describes—like those of Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme—is in the process of breaking down, losing its vitality and wearing away…. Through her initia...

In 1976 at Michigan State University, American and Canadian scholars and poets gathered to honor A. J. M. Smith, seventy-four-year-old doyen of Canadian letters. It is fitting that such a symposium should have been held at an American univ...

A. M. Klein (1909-1972), journalist and lawyer, was widely regarded as one of Canada's leading poets. His novel The Second Scroll has been acclaimed by scholars and critics as a masterpiece. He contributed significantly to the emergence of...

Although thus far she has written only three novels, A. S. Byatt has nonetheless achieved a distinguished place as a person of letters in the last two decades. As novelist, critic, reviewer, editor, and lecturer, Byatt offers in her work a...

SOURCE: Arthur, Paul. “Movie of the Moment: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” Film Comment 37, no. 4 (July-August 2001): 22-3. In the following review, Arthur perceives A.I.: Artificial Intelligence to be an unsuccessful amalgamation of S...

As an American, one is entitled to all the rights and privileges of a citizen. One can vote, hold office, drive any vehicle or own land. However, at one point in time African Americans were not entitled to these basic rights and principles ...

The Jewish author and journalist Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a prominent Socialist leader and union organizer among Jewish immigrants in the United States. Abraham Cahan was born in Podberezhie, near Vilna, Lithuania. His father was a st...

Abraham Polonsky's importance as a screenwriter rests both on his body of work--one of the strongest, continuously radical political statements in commercial American film--and on his role as symbol of the oppressed Hollywood writer, drive...

SOURCE: "Fathers and Sons: The Norative Basis of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel," in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4, Fall 1981, pp. 363-80. In the following excerpt, Donnelly demonstrates that in Absalom and Achitophel, Dr...

SOURCE: A review of Abundance, in Variety, Vol. 335, No. 4, May 10, 1989, p. 120. In the following negative review, the critic asserts that Abundance “is dragged down by its lack of an idea of where it's going or what it intends to accomp...

SOURCE: "Dario Fo, Politics and Satire: An Introduction to Accidental Death of an Anarchist," in Theater, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 1979, pp. 7-11. Cowan presents a brief survey of Fo's career and the background of Accidental Death of an Anarc...

SOURCE: A review of The Acid House, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 3, Summer, 1997, p. 401. In the following review of The Acid House, Bush examines Welsh's use of dialect and jargon, finding such language rhythmic and poetic. A ...

It is when Steinbeck abandons caution [in The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights] that he contributes most to the Arthurian tradition. In the early sections on Merlin, Balin and Balan, the feud with Morgan le Fay, he is often transla...

Throughout Adam Bede the characters of Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrell are compared and contrasted, albeit sometimes indirectly, both can, at times, represent the Madonna and the harlot. It is not always clear which woman is the harlot and w...

SOURCE: “Adam Mickiewicz: Poland's National Romantic Poet,” in South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 42, No. 4, November, 1977, pp. 103-13. In the following essay, Fagin offers an overview of Mickiewicz's literary career, observing that Mickiew...